Temperature and Human Capital in the Short and Long Run

Abstract

We provide the first estimates of the potential impact of climate change on cognitive performance and attainment, focusing on the impacts from both short-run weather and long-run climate. Exploiting the longitudinal structure of the NLSY79 and random fluctuations in weather across interviews, we identify the effect of temperature in models with child-specific fixed effects. We find that short-run changes in temperature lead to statistically significant decreases in cognitive performance on math (but not reading) beyond 26°C (78.8°F). In contrast, our long-run analysis, which relies upon long-difference and rich cross-sectional models, reveals an imprecisely estimated effect that is significantly smaller than the short-run relationship between climate and human capital.